Didi Kuo

Didi Kuo

Didi Kuo

  • Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

Biography

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

publications

Reports
January 2024

Political Parties Are Essential Democratic Institutions

Author(s)
cover link Political Parties Are Essential Democratic Institutions
Journal Articles
September 2023

Why Big Reform Is Possible

Author(s)
cover link Why Big Reform Is Possible
Journal Articles
November 2022

Associational Party-Building: A Path to Rebuilding Democracy

Author(s)
cover link Associational Party-Building: A Path to Rebuilding Democracy

In The News

January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol
Q&As

Will the Jan. 6 hearings make a difference? Stanford scholar discusses how they might shift public perception

The hearings will be a test for the Republican Party, and whether or not it can successfully disavow its extremist wing, says Stanford scholar.
cover link Will the Jan. 6 hearings make a difference? Stanford scholar discusses how they might shift public perception